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Course on the history of twentieth and twenty-first century American images of space and how they shape conceptions of the universe. Covers representations made by scientists and artists, as well as scientific fiction films, TV, and other forms of popular visual culture. Topics will include the importance of aesthetics to understandings of the cosmos; the influence of media and technology on representations; the social, political, and historical context of the images; and the ways representations of space influence notions of American national identity and of cosmic citizenship.

This course examines social conflicts and political controversies in American culture through the lens of visual art and photography. We consider how visual images both reflect and participate in the social and political life of the nation and how the terms of citizenship have been represented¿and, at times, contested¿by artists throughout the first half of the 20th century. The class explores the relation between American art and the body politic by focusing on issues of poverty, war, censorship, consumerism, class identity, and racial division.

AMSTUD 146C:Hemingway, Hurston, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald

While Hemingway and Fitzgerald were flirting with the expatriate avant-garde in Europe, Hurston and Faulkner were performing anthropological field-work in the local cultures of the American South. Focus on the tremendous diversity of concerns and styles of four writers who marked America's coming-of-age as a literary nation with their multifarious experiments in representing the regional and the global, the racial and the cosmopolitan, the macho and the feminist, the decadent and the impoverished.

AMSTUD 147J:Studies in Music, Media, and Popular Culture: The Soul Tradition in African American Music (AFRICAAM 19, CSRE 147J, MUSIC 147J, MUSIC 247J)

The African American tradition of soul music from its origins in blues, gospel, and jazz to its influence on today's r&b, hip hop, and dance music. Style such as rhythm and blues, Motown, Southern soul, funk, Philadelphia soul, disco, Chicago house, Detroit techno, trip hop, and neo-soul. Soul's cultural influence and global reach; its interaction with politics, gender, place, technology, and the economy. Pre-/corequisite (for music majors):
MUSIC 22. (WIM at 4 units only.)

AMSTUD 150:Introduction to English II: American Literature and Culture to 1855 (ENGLISH 11B)

(Formerly
English 23/123). A survey of early American writings, including sermons, poetry, captivity and slave narratives, essays, autobiography, and fiction, from the colonial era to the eve of the Civil War.

AMSTUD 150A:Colonial and Revolutionary America (HISTORY 150A)

(Same as
HISTORY 50A. History majors and others taking 5 units, register for
HISTORY 150A.) Survey of the origins of American society and polity in the 17th and 18th centuries. Topics: the migration of Europeans and Africans and the impact on native populations; the emergence of racial slavery and of regional, provincial, Protestant cultures; and the political origins and constitutional consequences of the American Revolution.

AMSTUD 152C:The JFK Era and American Literature

Few U.S. presidents have exerted so great a fascination on the national¿and global¿post-World War II imagination as John F. Kennedy. As the 2013¿s semi-centennial anniversary of Kennedy¿s assassination attests, the production of films, television and multimedia programs, biographies, conspiracy theories, academic studies, and literary texts about the iconic JFK and his fabled, thousand-day presidency continues unabated. In this course, we will explore the attention Kennedy has drawn from writers and filmmakers in texts by Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others.

Examination of the explosion of African American artistic expression during 1920s and 30s New York known as the Harlem Renaissance. Amiri Baraka once referred to the Renaissance as a kind of "vicious Modernism", as a "BangClash", that impacted and was impacted by political, cultural and aesthetic changes not only in the U.S. but Europe, the Caribbean and Latin America. Focus on the literature, graphic arts, and the music of the era in this global context.

AMSTUD 152K:Mixed-Race Politics and Culture (AFRICAAM 226, CSRE 152K)

Today, almost one-third of Americans identify with a racial/ethnic minority group, and more than 9 million Americans identify with multiple races. What are the implications of such diversity for American politics and culture? This course approaches issues of race from an interdisciplinary perspective, employing research in the social sciences and humanities to assess how race shapes perceptions of identity as well as political behavior in 21st-century U.S. Issues surrounding the role of multiculturalism, immigration, acculturation, racial representation, and racial prejudice in American society. Topics include the political and social formation of race; racial representation in the media, arts, and popular culture; the rise and decline of the "one-drop rule" and its effect on political and cultural attachments; the politicization of census categories and the rise of the multiracial movement.

Last offered: Spring 2015
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-ED

AMSTUD 154:American Intellectual and Cultural History to the Civil War (HISTORY 154)

(Same as
HISTORY 54. History majors and others taking 5 units, register for 154.) How Americans considered problems such as slavery, imperialism, and sectionalism. Topics include: the political legacies of revolution; biological ideas of race; the Second Great Awakening; science before Darwin; reform movements and utopianism; the rise of abolitionism and proslavery thought; phrenology and theories of human sexuality; and varieties of feminism. Sources include texts and images.